How Strong Will the Anti-Democratic Backlash Be?

Why isn’t the Republican Party paying a heavy price for its dependence on a shrinking white electorate, its rejection of immigration reform and its “just say no” legislative strategy?

According to a number of analysts, including Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, Republicans are slightly favored this year to retake the Senate and to increase their majority in the House.

Most explanations involve likely turnout patterns – the pro-Republican tilt of the whiter, older and more affluent electorate in nonpresidential election years. Another key factor is Obama’s current 52.6 percent disapproval rating.

Bill McInturff, the founder of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, offered me a succinct comment to explain how the midterm elections are shaping up:

“ON THE RECORD: Thank you President Obama.”

Going largely unmentioned in most analyses is the inability of the Obama administration to markedly improve the economy, which could end up playing a big role in the unraveling of the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes, not only in 2014 but also in 2016.

But first let’s turn to the president’s unfavorability ratings, which by all accounts are hurting Democratic House and Senate candidates. Figure 1, which was produced by RealClearPolitics, shows how bad the past year has been for the president.

The worst period for Obama was from late October through early December, 2013, after the disastrous launch of the Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment period. On Dec. 3, Obama hit his nadir, with 39.8 percent approving and 55.9 percent disapproving of his job performance.

The damage inflicted on the Democratic Party by the dysfunctional website and the reaction to it is hard to overestimate. A graph (Figure 2) of the generic House vote in a second RealClearPolitics chart shows a dramatic drop in Democratic support coinciding with the Healthcare.gov site malfunction. To determine the generic vote, pollsters ask: “If the election for the U.S. House of Representatives were being held today, would you vote for the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate in your congressional district?”

As the figure illustrates, the generic vote shifted from a 5.5 percentage point Democratic advantage on Oct. 15, 2013, to a 2.5 percentage point Republican advantage on Dec. 2.

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Fig. 1

Some political scientists, with a longer-term perspective, argue that no matter how dire Democratic prospects are for the midterm elections, future trends may be more positive.

Edward G. Carmines of Indiana University wrote me to make the case that in the 2016 presidential election, the changing demographic character of the electorate threatens Republicans: “Only if the Republicans lose in 2016 will they finally come to the realization of the painful changes they need to make if their party is to be regularly competitive in future presidential elections.”

Stephen Ansolabehere, of the Harvard government department, argued in an email that there “is the long-run (structural) challenge facing the G.O.P. and there is the short-run, immediate opportunity.” The election this year is particularly problematic for Democrats because the senators up for election last faced the voters in 2008 when Democrats, with Obama at the top of the ticket for the first time, “won some seats that no one expected them to.”

Ansolabehere is pessimistic about Democratic presidential prospects in 2016, noting that since the election of Harry Truman in 1948, no party has won the presidency three times in a row except the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “It’s not impossible, but it is unlikely,” Ansolabehere says.

Gary Jacobson of the University of California, San Diego, a specialist on Congress, predicts that the House will remain in Republican hands through the end of the decade because “the distribution of voters across districts strongly favors Republicans.”

Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, suggests that the key turning point favoring Democrats may not come until 2020: “Republicans are not defying long range, adverse trends. They might even win the presidency in 2016 despite those trends if short-term forces favor them. But the longer-term outlook, meaning 2020 and beyond, is still pretty grim for them.”

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David Axelrod, a senior political strategist in both Obama presidential campaigns and, between campaigns, a senior adviser in the White House (he is now the director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago), argues in an email that “there are structural elements that favor the Republicans this year. Gerrymandering of districts has given the Republicans a solid edge in the House, and there are seven Senate seats up this year that are currently held by Democrats in red states that Romney carried in 2012. All Democrats had a little more wind at their backs six years ago when they ran in a midterm election and Obama was at his zenith of popularity.”

Sean Trende, a senior election analyst at RealClearPolitics, in some respects concurs: “What we’re really seeing this cycle is a function of the Democrats’ declining ability to win white voters, especially in the South and border states. The demographic changes that are working in Democrats’ favor elsewhere simply are not helping them in many of the most competitive states this cycle: South Dakota, West Virginia, Montana, Michigan, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alaska, New Hampshire and Iowa.”

In addition, Trende argues, “whites might be a declining share of the electorate, but they’re still over 70 percent of the electorate, meaning that if Republicans make relatively small improvements in their vote share with whites, they will achieve stasis.”

In fact, a relatively modest boost in white turnout, combined with a slight drop in Democratic margins among minorities when Obama no longer the tops the ticket, Trende writes, will lead to numbers “well within tolerance for a big Republican win.”

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Fig. 2

These analyses do not address a separate issue: the failure of the Obama administration to propel strong economic growth.

Democratic election victories in recent years have resulted more from hostility to the Republican Party than from support gained through positive economic achievements.

The Obama years have been marked by a prolonged period of economic stagnation, a falling standard of living for those in the bottom half and a growing schism in the distribution of income between top and bottom.

Median family income has declined and inequality has grown worse, even as Obama has called inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” The plight of the long-term unemployed is particularly vexing.

Alan Krueger, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from November 2011 to August 2013, writing with two co-authors about unemployment earlier this month, found that “from 2008 to 2012, only 11 percent of those who were long-term unemployed in a given month returned to steady, full-time employment a year later.” This “unlucky subset of the unemployed,” Krueger writes, has become a peripheral constituency receding “into the margins of the labor market” or withdrawing “from the labor force altogether.”

Separately, the center-left Urban Institute has concluded that this unemployed constituency represents what is likely to be a growing problem: a “mismatch” between current job requirements and workers’ obsolete skills. Stunningly, 62 percent of the long-term unemployed are 25 to 54 years old, according to the National Employment Law Project.

Kathleen Geier, commenting on the Krueger paper in The Washington Monthly, declared: “it is the most thoroughly depressing policy document I’ve read in quite some time.”

Demographics look promising for the Democratic Party, but the people who make up those demographics seek economic change that the party shows no signs of delivering – and may not be able to deliver. The party has mastered the techniques of turning out its voters, at least in presidential election years, but it now faces the much more difficult task of improving the lives of its supporters.

It’s not clear that the Democratic Party, as currently constituted, is prepared to take on that task. Has it even conceptualized, let alone implemented, adequate economic or political innovation? Nor is it clear whether the global and domestic forces now imposing such heavy costs on the poor and even the middle class lend themselves to government-directed amelioration.